I have no love (or use) for corporate linguistics (I find them mostly repellant, and am never in that environment), but the action of bringing forward and pushing back, meaning sooner and later, respectively, is entirely logical and correct to my brain.

Felix Mitchell @28 says it perfectly, for me. It isn’t about timelines, it’s about people describing plannable time (the future) in natural, physical metaphors.

So, no timeline, there is only the future before us, and we push away from us (later, into the future) or pull forward to us (sooner, out of the future).

For me, there are no mental gymnastics or linguistic perversions involved.

]]>By: ChunkyMonkeyBrainhttp://boingboing.net/2009/08/12/the-surprising-links.html#comment-564754
Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000#comment-564754@#10
“I think I know why the Monday people are more pleasant. The cognitively impaired tend to be very friendly.”

Apparently you haven’t been to any of the Town Hall meetings about health care reform then.

]]>By: huntsuhttp://boingboing.net/2009/08/12/the-surprising-links.html#comment-564755
Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000#comment-564755Asking this on a Wednesday kind of confuses the issue, since a meeting scheduled for today could not possible be rescheduled for two days ago so most folks reading this on a Wednesday would think Friday no matter how they think about time.
]]>By: Anonymoushttp://boingboing.net/2009/08/12/the-surprising-links.html#comment-565523
Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000#comment-565523I think it all depends on what you are talking about… if you move the “party” forward two days I’d think it’s on Monday, but if my dentist appointment gets moved forward two days then I’d think it was Friday. I really think a lot of it has to do with whether or not you want to be at the “forwarded” occasion.
]]>By: Anonymoushttp://boingboing.net/2009/08/12/the-surprising-links.html#comment-565269
Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000#comment-565269One reason the question is confusing is because I naturally think of rescheduling something as being done at the last minute (maybe it’s because I’m a procrastinator)–if it’s Tuesday and they say the meeting has been pushed two days, I won’t even bother to pay attention to whether they said “pushed back” or “pushed forward”, since for obvious reasons they can’t reschedule it to yesterday! It would make more sense if they said something like, “on Thursday you get a memo that a meeting which had been scheduled for next Wednesday has been pushed back by two days”.
]]>By: Anonymoushttp://boingboing.net/2009/08/12/the-surprising-links.html#comment-565014
Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000#comment-565014#27, #35, I tend to view weeks and days horizontally, from left to right (like on a calender), with months and years being vertical.

#34, no one really understands day light savings time.

As for the original question, I first thought it was Friday as others had because I assumed that today was Wednesday and the meeting couldn’t be moved to the past.

Really I think it’s just a poorly worded question that you could take either way if you assumed something wrong like I did. The better way would be to say “The meeting originally scheduled for Wednesday has been moved to Monday.”

]]>By: Anonymoushttp://boingboing.net/2009/08/12/the-surprising-links.html#comment-564760
Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000#comment-564760If a meeting has been pushed forward 2 days from Wednesday, I would assume it would then be on Monday. Forward being forward in time. The meeting was 48 hours away, now it’s only 24 hours away.

But, I have made this mistake before so I would see when my coworkers were going to be there and that’s when I would go too.

If a meeting has been pushed back 2 days from Monday, I would think it would then be on Friday. Pushed back would mean pushed away from me – not 24 hours but 48 hours away.

This conundrum has always felt like the whole up hill/down hill thing. It’s all down hill from here, to me means things are going to get easier. It’s all uphill from here means things are getting harder. I do know that not everyone thinks this way.

I never thought of moving from Wednesday to Monday as a way of moving forward in time, but I guess you’re right.

I thought it was some kind of ‘insert two days'(Thursday and Friday) between Wednesday and the meeting, and, skipping the non-working weekend, they arrive at Monday.

]]>By: Camp Freddiehttp://boingboing.net/2009/08/12/the-surprising-links.html#comment-565533
Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000#comment-565533This has nothing to do with perceptions of time and everything to do with culture.

I assumed Monday, since common speech would be, “Bring the meeting forward”.
At no point did I stop to consider whether I was talking about the meeting as being moved forward in the time dimension vs. the meeting as a 4D object moved forward in my direction.

My issue with the study is that there is no causal relationship to justify the inferences of your temperament based on the respondent’s philosophy of time perception. A colleague had an interesting (and possibly somewhat cynical) take on one potential association with temperament. His reasoning:

People who have spent time in the corporate world assume that a meeting is never rescheduled earlier. Knowing full well that this question was posed ambiguously, they omit the term “forward” and think strictly in terms of the future. Therefore it may be not that people who have a “you moving time” philosophy are angrier, but rather people who have been subjected to corporate culture are angrier.

I think I prefer this interpretation the most, if only because it is humorously consoling.

]]>By: The Life Of Bryanhttp://boingboing.net/2009/08/12/the-surprising-links.html#comment-564768
Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000#comment-564768Are they sure they don’t have cause and effect confused? Or for that matter, cause and correlation?

Seems to me that the way you normally think about the flow of time could have a great impact on your general outlook.

]]>By: boing_xhttp://boingboing.net/2009/08/12/the-surprising-links.html#comment-565539
Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000#comment-565539Wow. I had to read that several times too, because I couldn’t get past the part where it says “if you think it’s Friday…”. I kept jumping back and thinking “he just said it was Monday, didn’t he?”. I had to read through many of the comments to even understand how someone could possibly think it was Friday and I still don’t really get it.
]]>By: boing_xhttp://boingboing.net/2009/08/12/the-surprising-links.html#comment-565541
Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000#comment-565541Maybe the Friday people are angry all the time because they can never figure out what’s going on.
]]>By: Anonymoushttp://boingboing.net/2009/08/12/the-surprising-links.html#comment-564774
Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000#comment-564774Without reading the linked article, Mark’s synopsis is illustrating the ambiguity of language and how priming is used to bias the disambiguation. Clear your mind (difficult to do) and read again:

Here’s a test: let’s say a meeting, originally scheduled for Wednesday, has been moved forward two days. What is the new day of the meeting? If you think it’s Monday, you think of time as something that passes by you. If you think it’s Friday, you imagine time as something you move through.

Seeing “Monday” first can help prime the disambiguation of what “moved forward” means.

Incidentally, in Mandarin, ä¸€å‰ (yi qian) means “earlier” or “past” — but also “in front of” — which sounds like crazy-talk in English, since things in the past are supposed to be “behind you”. …Except, the English word “before” does the same thing: “before” in time is behind you, “before” in space is in front of you.

]]>By: Phikushttp://boingboing.net/2009/08/12/the-surprising-links.html#comment-564775
Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000#comment-564775When people say to me at work that the time for a meeting is pushed forward, it means earlier. Pushing the meeting back means later. Does this mean I have a friendlier workplace than most?
]]>By: Anonymoushttp://boingboing.net/2009/08/12/the-surprising-links.html#comment-567338
Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000#comment-567338I thought the meeting was on Friday, and I’m one of the least angry people I know, but I guess there are always outliers. If it said the meeting was “brought forward” or “pulled forward”, I might have thought it was Monday, because those imply drawing something towards oneself. But with the neutral “moved”, I assume that “forward” is relative to the calendar, not relative to my presence in time or whether I am facing the meeting. I also visualized “forward” as moving to the right.
]]>By: MadMoleculehttp://boingboing.net/2009/08/12/the-surprising-links.html#comment-564779
Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000#comment-564779I’m always slightly disconcerted by those day-planners that show each hour of the day as a row, with 8 a.m. being up top and time moving downward to 5 p.m. at the bottom. In my mind the day starts at the bottom and moves upward, so that 5 p.m. should be at the top.
]]>By: arkizzle / Moderatorhttp://boingboing.net/2009/08/12/the-surprising-links.html#comment-565035
Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000#comment-565035To be clear, I don’t speak to the temperament issue, just the linguistics. I wonder, how did you present the scenario to your pals?

I just did, to my housemate, like this: Next week, you have a meeting. It is moved forward two days. What day is the meeting on?

He answered Monday.

I find no credence with the presumption that a “meeting is never rescheduled earlier”, I’m afraid. So can only presume it is one of those things, that commonly gets interpreted differently. A binary issue.

]]>By: Beelzebuddyhttp://boingboing.net/2009/08/12/the-surprising-links.html#comment-564787
Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000#comment-564787#1: If you think of an object “facing the ceiling” as having no vertical axis, you are more likely to have your brain hurt by such a description.

#14: Pratchett’s Discworld trolls have such a backwards idea of time. He may well have poached the concept from someone else though, that is his style.

]]>By: Anonymoushttp://boingboing.net/2009/08/12/the-surprising-links.html#comment-566323
Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000#comment-566323I work with ETA dates all day. If you tell someone that their date has been pushed back, they will not be happy. Conversely, they will thank me for moving their date forward. The low foreheads who chose Friday can draw their own conclusion from this.
]]>By: Anonymoushttp://boingboing.net/2009/08/12/the-surprising-links.html#comment-564792
Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000#comment-564792I deal with people constantly who use language in incorrect or ambigious ways… so “move forward” means different things depending on when they tell me.

If someone tells me on Wednesday or later that the meeting was “moved forward 2 days,” I’ll assume Monday. If they tell me on Tuesday or earlier, I’ll assume Friday (unless it’s Monday, in which case I’ll read from their level of tension whether they mean today or five days from now).

Keep in mind I deal with lawyers who give me EXTREMELY URGENT directions to move terabytes of data to “different memory,” and I don’t have the luxury of asking “do you mean a different harddrive, different RAM chips, or a different server?”

]]>By: Sekinohttp://boingboing.net/2009/08/12/the-surprising-links.html#comment-564795
Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000#comment-564795I just want to know how many people have missed that meeting…
]]>By: mdhhttp://boingboing.net/2009/08/12/the-surprising-links.html#comment-564798
Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000#comment-564798If I had a meeting at 1 o’clock and it was moved forward 2 hours, did I miss it?

This was discussed at the meeting. You were not there. I drank your milkshake.

]]>By: Anonymoushttp://boingboing.net/2009/08/12/the-surprising-links.html#comment-565055
Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000#comment-565055At my job, “push back” is corporate-ese for “that isn’t going to happen.” As in, “I’m getting some push back about that new hire request.” Oddly, it doesn’t have anything to do with time, or meetings.

More substantially, both usages make me want to beat the speaker to death with a 2×4. I guess you could call me angry?